admin Black holes are one of the most active areas of cosmological research. We know that they are serious problems, that their effects reach the farthest reaches of the universe, and that they sometimes challenge the laws of physics.
Interestingly, these gigantic gravity wells have long been thought to be fairly easy to explain, even though they remain a constant mystery. The researchers needed only three parameters, he said: mass, angular momentum (how fast it spins), and electric charge. Because of this straightness, some physicists call black holes “naked.”
But there is a big catch. It’s the Hawking information paradox. Introduced by Dr. Stephen Hawking in 1976, this paradox is essentially that black holes make the impossible possible: they destroy information.
But astronomers believe they have finally solved the paradox.
Information is indestructible according to the laws of quantum physics. We need to be able to analyze an existing object and use the information it contains to trace the evolutionary history of that object and find out where it came from. For example, we should be able to observe the aftermath of a supernova explosion and identify the type of star that exploded.
However, Dr. Hawking argued that the current understanding of black holes does not allow them to be traced to their source. You can’t tell what kind of star fell there by looking at the radiation from a black hole. That’s because the radiation emitted by black holes (known as Hawking radiation) is thermal in nature and cannot carry information.
Dr. Hawking also discovered that information cannot stay in a black hole forever. And if you can’t escape the radiation, you’ll be destroyed.
Or maybe?
The answer is no, according to a research group that just published a new study. And that goes back to the idea of a “naked” black hole.
Last year, this group of researchers published a paper claiming that the black hole is not bald at all, and that he now has what is casually called “quantum hair.” The bottom line is that if you watch a black hole warp space-time very close to the horizon, you can see a kind of fingerprint at the quantum level that suggests where the matter inside came from. So his hair contained the missing information.
At the time of writing this article, the whole idea of quantum hair was just a very abstract mathematical concept. But now, in a new study, the researchers argue that hair is a mass of wax, breaking down that paradox.
The researchers repeated Hawking’s original calculations, showing that black holes emit only informationless thermal Hawking radiation, but with an additional component, quantum gravity. This is an explanation for gravity existing in the quantum realm, which Dr. Hawking did not initially consider.
“Though these quantum gravity corrections are insignificant, they are crucial for black hole evaporation,” Xavier Carme, a professor of physics and lead author of the study, wrote in a Live Science article. Stated. “We were able to show that these effects alter Hawking radiation and make this radiation non-thermal. In other words, given quantum gravity, radiation contains information It is possible.”
This study shows that, contrary to historical assumptions, Hawking radiation could pick up information from black holes and carry it out into space. Information stored in the hairs around the black hole could be executed. No more destruction, no more paradoxes.
This group is now convinced that they have solved what Dr. Hawking failed to do, but it is very difficult, if not impossible, to corroborate the results with observations. Of course, that doesn’t mean they should be fired. Even if we have never seen a particular object, we have learned a lot about the universe through mathematics and models.
It means that we cannot see this glorious information on our devices. Hawking radiation is so weak (which is completely theoretical even at this point) that we don’t have powerful enough detectors to detect it. Perhaps we will eventually be able to see quantum hairs using gravitational waves, but even that technology is clearly next-generation.
For now, we have to be content with what we find on Earth. The research team has already built an extensive mathematical model of the phenomenon and proposes testing it with simulated black holes in the lab.
There are still plenty of opportunities for exploration and deeper research. And even if this study confirms something, just because the information isn’t clear doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
